Invoicing is an important if not indispensable part of today's business transactions. Generally speaking, an invoice is a commercial document issued by one business partner to another, evidencing a transaction in which terms such as the products or services, their quantities, and agreed prices are indicated. The issuance of the invoice from one business partner to another signifies that payment is due from the partner receiving the invoice to the partner posting the invoice according to the agreed terms of the invoice. It is typical for the invoice to also include references to prior documents, such as purchase orders, goods receipt, and other documents that have been produced in connection with the business transaction.
Invoicing may also require, in certain applications, the management of large volumes of data. In particular, an invoicing system often must analyze large volumes of data to produce reports and generate the invoices. For example, an invoicing system may be part of a toll collection system for automotive highways, where customers have an account that is charged each time the customer passes a toll collection station on the highway. Such a system may have hundreds of thousands of customers to invoice. And each customer may have hundreds of transactions to be billed (e.g., for companies operating a fleet of 1000 trucks, an invoice can easily contain thousands of line items based on each time a driver drives through a toll collection station). As a result, the invoicing system may need to process a massive amount of data each billing period.
Due to the large amount of data, many businesses have expanded their reliance on electronically stored data and, as a result, use databases, servers, and networks to process the large amount of data. However, processing resources are limited. For example, a large billing invoice may take a typical computing system a significant amount of time to generate. When generating an invoice, the system may be unable to work on other tasks, such as processing customer relationship management (CRM) interactions.
In view of the foregoing, there is a need for systems, methods, and computing tools that effectively and efficiently assist in the management, generation, and distribution of invoices, including mass invoices.